shut up and let me see your jazz hands

1. I seem to have past the phase of really wanting a soda. Now I don't even think about it, so that's good. Not really missing the caffeine, either. I'm not going to cut it out completely (for example, I'm going out to lunch with my mom this Friday and will probably have a soda then), but going to really limit it to an occasional thing when I go out to eat.

2. We sell fresh baked goods from several local bakeries at my work and the one that we get all our fresh mochi & Japanese sweets from had some trouble and is out of commission indefinitely, so we're going to be getting stuff from Fugetsu-do now! Their stuff is way better than the other two we were carrying, and customers are always asking if we have their stuff, so I think it will sell well. The owner came today to talk with my manager and he brought lots of samples for us. I had a bunch of their peanut butter mochi and chocolate mochi, among other things, and I think I will have to buy a package of the pb ones when we officially start selling them. They're so good. *_* The mochi itself is strawberry flavored, so it's sort of like a peanut butter & jelly taste. (The chocolate one is also really good, with chocolate filling, not just chocolate flavored mochi.)

3. Speaking of snacks, I got my next Graze box in the mail today, so it's a good thing I finally tackled that backlog of photos.

( One from my 5th box, plus the last of the old ones )

1. Today I tried the green tea latte version of that milk tea I had the other day. It was pretty good! :D (I think I like the black tea one better, though.)

2. I haven't had a soda all week! I had one energy drink early on in the week for sure, but I think only that once? Maybe twice. But otherwise it's just been water and a few of these milk tea drinks.

3. I also haven't eaten out or bought lunch or ordered pizza or anything at all this week. I've been tempted to stop and get fast food a couple times on the way home from work, but there was always some leftovers I needed to eat up, so I didn't.

4. I had some cookies & cream ice cream tonight and it was really great! When I bought it, I was dithering over flavors, but I definitely made the right choice. :)

5. Day off tomorrow yay!

1. Day off tomorrow. Looking forward to sleeping in and maybe not going anywhere. (I have a couple places I might go, but nothing very high priority, so I'll see how I feel.)

2. One of the survey sites I do used to only offer rewards in the form of a check, but I just went to redeem my points and they now offer a whole bunch of stuff including Amazon gift cards and Paypal.

3. My old manager brought in a ton of food for people to take home, since it's not like they want to just pack up a bunch of random stuff from their cupboard and ship it to Japan. Someone else grabbed the box of Rice Chex before me (damn it, I love Chex!) but I did get some other good stuff, including an unopened can of baking powder, which I just noticed I was almost out of last time I made banana muffins. :D

4. We got in these new milk teas at work and they're so good! (And also on sale this week!) Teas'Tea Black Tea Latte.

5. Just one more week until Super Luigi Bros!

What are you currently reading?
The last couple chapters of Shingeki no Kyojin. Then I will have to wait for each new chapter as it comes out. D:

Anyway, I'm really, really, REALLY enjoying this. So much intrigue! So many things I want to know!

( Spoilers )

What did you recently finish reading?
Um, nothing other than a bunch of Shingeki no Kyojin.

What do you think you'll read next?
Sadly the answer is not "more Shingeki no Kyojin". :( I did download a couple more chapters of Silver Spoon, so probably that, and I still have this week's and most of last week's Jump to read.

1. For the first time in what feels like forever, but surely hasn't actually been that long, we were not short cashiers today, so I did not have to help out at the register at all and could actually stay at my desk the entire day and do my own job. My inbox is still overflowing and it doesn't really look like I made a dent, but I went through at least an inch or so of papers, so that's something. Hopefully tomorrow will be more of the same. (I have invoices from April still that I've checked by hand but not put into the computer, and that's probably bad for anyone looking at reports of what we actually spent that month, so I really need to get those in, but argh!)

2. I was really tempted to have some sort of energy drink or something at work today, but resisted! I did have a glass of iced tea when I got home, but more to use up the last of the tea Irene made when she was here than because I was hoping to get any sort of energy boost from it.

3. I just have one more volume and four chapters left to read of Shingeki no Kyojin. Argh, it's so good! I don't want to be caught up because then I'll have to wait for more. It's so good, though. *_* So good!

Okay, so. It's coming up on the deadline for kink_bingo really soon (the 15th!!) and I still have nothing for the amnesty. I'm looking at my card, but I just have no ideas.

On the one hand, maybe that means it's best to just not do anything and skip next year's KB, but I want to at least give it a try.

So that's why I'm asking you guys for help. Under the cut is my table. I'm looking for ideas, any ideas. Fic prompts are good (any pairing/fandom you think I'm familiar with is fine), but ideas for things that aren't fic are good, too.

( my card! )

There was a shooting at Santa Monica College today, which is right across the street from me, but thankfully I'm all right and it seems to be over.

I went out with my mom this morning to go to Costco and brunch and after I got home around noonish, I was on the phone with Irene and heard really loud helicopters. We do get a lot of helicopters around here, though, so I didn't think anything of it except to be annoyed at the noise. While I was on the phone, I got another call, and when I checked my voicemail after I was done talking to Irene, it was Alexander asking if I was okay because he'd heard there was a shooting at SMC. I googled and found a local news story about it saying it was at the library, which is the other side of campus from me, but still like half a mile, and at that time there was no info on whether the shooter was still out there or what. Thankfully I had no plans to go out this afternoon, so I just locked my doors and listened to the helicopters and sirens for hours on end.

It's not like there haven't been people shot in the area before, but a burglar or gang member with a handgun is really different from someone with a semiautomatic and a bulletproof vest. O_o

1. Today was my new manager's first full day. My old manager is still here for another week or so, to help train the new manager (who has never been a manager before, just asst. manager) and just to help around the store with stocking, etc. I really am going to miss my current manager. :-/ The new guy seems nice, though.

2. Today was my sleep-in day. I thought I might wake up before the alarm, since I went to bed around midnight, but I slept straight through. I read for an hour after going to bed, and then (of course) didn't fall asleep right away after that, but still probably got at least nine hours of sleep, so that's good!

3. I remembered to wash and cut up the strawberries I had in the fridge, along with some cantaloupe, so I will have fruit to take for lunch tomorrow. :) (I keep seeing them both in the fridge in the morning when looking for stuff to take for lunch, but don't want to spend the time right then to fix them up.)

4. Irene alerted me to the fact that Final Fantasy Tactics is currently on sale for the iphone! It's $7.99, which is still kind of pricey tbh, but considering the usual price of FF games, I'll take it. :D Tactics is my favorite FF game anyway.

5. And speaking of games, I signed up for this Club Nintendo thing where if you register your products and take little surveys, you can get coins that you can redeem for merchandise (not that interesting to me) or games (very interesting to me). I got 160 coins for registering my Wii U, and Super Mario Bros 3 and Metroid II are both 150 coins each until June 30th, so I'm trying to decide which I want! On the one hand, SMB3 is one I definitely want to get at some point, but while I did own Metroid II for the gameboy back in the day, I don't think I ever completed it, so maybe I should get that... So hard to choose!

...Oh wait. I just took another look and it appears Metroid is only for the 3DS, so I guess my decision is made for me! SMB3 it is!

1. I did not have any soda or energy drinks today! Which resulted in me being really tired after I got home from work, and I considered taking a nap, but didn't want to throw off my sleep schedule, so I just sat here being really tired for a few hours and then perked up a little while ago for no apparent reason.

2. Speaking of sleep, I would really like to try and get to bed a little earlier. I usually go to bed around two, then read for a little bit, so maybe start seriously trying to get to sleep around 2.15, 2.30ish, but then of course it takes me a long time to get to sleep, and I have to wake up at nine most days, so I'm definitely getting less sleep than I should be. Last night I went to bed at one and read for a full hour, which still meant I was getting an earlier start on trying to get to sleep than I usually do (while still giving me lots of reading time, since I wasn't really that tired when I went to bed). Ideally I'd like to continue to do that or even go to bed earlier (midnight is probably pushing it, but maybe 12.30, idk). Getting more sleep would definitely help with trying to resist caffeine.

3. I actually got quite a lot done at work today. It feels like lately I've not had any time to try and tackle the backlog of stuff, but today I finished sorting everything new that came in and was able to get a lot of the stuff in my inbox done. (Only a small fraction of what's in there, but a lot more than any other day in the last month or so.)

1. I slept in until after one. ^_^;;

2. I also managed to go the whole day without a soda or any type of caffeine except half a glass of iced tea. (And I didn't have a headache, either.) It's always easier to resist temptation on my days off if I don't have any soda in the house, since I'd have to go out and get some, so we'll see how it goes at work tomorrow.

3. I got some hot dogs on sale the other day and also had some corn in the fridge, so last night I got out some chicken from the freezer and marinated it overnight and then grilled a bunch of stuff today. I also ended up slicing up a sweet potato that had been on the counter for months (I kept thinking I'd like to make tempura, but that's such a pain in the ass I never got around to it) and tossed that on the grill as well. I had a couple of the hot dogs for lunch and then put some of the chicken in a salad for dinner. :)

4. I also made banana muffins today. Several months ago when I had way more bananas than I could eat and also more than would fit in the freezer, I mashed them all up and put them in baggies and then put them in the freezer. Not only does this take up less space, but it's easy to take out a bag and thaw it and have it ready for muffins. I also had some coconut and chocolate chips in the drawer, so I added those and made my favorite kind of banana muffins. :)

5. Despite having known about AKB48 for years, I had somehow managed to never hear any of their songs (except the one they did for Wreck-It Ralph). Part of this was that I just haven't been making the effort to listen to jpop by artists I don't already know (with English music, I hear a lot of new stuff by having Pandora on at work, but for Japanese stuff I tend to just stick to my old favorites these days), but also I felt kind of meh about the idea of them after having been burned by Hello Project stuff. But then yesterday laceblade had a post about an AKB48 anime, and included a video for one of their songs, and I listened and it was really good! The song was Heavy Rotation and it has a sort of early '90s sound to it. I downloaded a couple of their albums and have so far really loved what I've heard. So yay for new music.